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Oscar Hijuelos, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who died Saturday, was a cultural pioneer who wrote elegant novels about ambitious Cuban expatriates and music-loving New Yorkers. He told stories that revealed the texture and passion of the Latino immigrant experience to legions of non-Latino readers for the first time. The son of Cuban immigrants, Hijuelos was born and raised in the upper half of Manhattan, in one of those wonderfully integrated, working-class neighborhoods the United States produced in the middle of the last century. His friends in the West Harlem neighborhood of Morningside Heights were German, Irish, black and Latino. When Hijuelos started writing, taking...

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Oscar Hijuelos, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who died Saturday, was a cultural pioneer who wrote elegant novels about ambitious Cuban expatriates and music-loving New Yorkers. He told stories that revealed the texture and passion of the Latino...

Jose Curbelo, a Latin jazz bandleader, agent and promoter who helped popularize the cha-cha in the United States and made Tito Puente a star, has died. He was 95.A resident of North Miami Beach, Curbelo died Friday of heart failure at a hospital in...